ief welsh was assassinated in greece. two fbi agents were killed at pine ridge indian reservation a bombing by nationalist killed 11 people and puerto rican nationalists killed four in a bombing in downtown new york so with this dynamic threat environment going on how is it possible that the investigation began? why was it necessary, and why did you want to be a part of it? >> i think you begin by looking at the story that got an explosive headline in the "new york times" containing the list of abuses and dysfunction in the intelligence agencies a list made up by the agency itself. they told the nation we were really in trouble, and if you look at these problems that you've sited one of the reasons

why we had to reform and make the agencies more responsive was in order to deal with the threat set that were apparent to the security of the our nation, and i would say that there was a general agreement to that. i remember i was on the floor when john stood up and moved the creation of what is now known as the church committee on the grounds that this could not continue. i'm convinced that mike saw right away that this had to be dealt with. i think what we did could be explained because it helped prevent some of the abuses in the past, and some of the mistakes of the past cost us dearly, but also because we have this straighten this out and only an outside committee within the control of the senate could

do it. >> why did you want to be on it? >> wow. well, you know, i had followed this stuff as a senator, i had been attorney general in my state, dealt with these issues, and i sense that something was really wrong without being in on the inside when i heard i said, when you set this committee up would you look at me, he said, yeah, i will. >> great. senator hart, you were a freshman senator three weeks on the job at that point. hour did you handle this kind of -- given a prom innocent role as well as a drafter, primary drafter of the report happen how did you handle that responsibility so quickly? >> well, i was not only a freshman senator, but it was my first month in the senate. i had barely met the other senators by this time and to answer the first question, which is, why do it now, is why hadn't

we done it before? first article of the constitution requires the congress of the united states to oversee operations of the executive branch, all of them. it does not exempt national security. and from 1947 and the passage of the national security act beginning of the creation of what's been called the national security state, which then incorporated this -- began to incorporate cia and expand very very rapidly there had been not only virtually, but there had been no congressional oversight, so the -- historically the question is between 1947 and 1975, why hadn't congress done its work, and we could spend a profitable hour discussing how most members of congress did not want to know and, in fact, said senior members of the senate had

said i don't want to know. well, that's not what the constitution says. you have to know whether you want to or not, and so this was long overdue. >> and what did that experience teach you as a young senator how the government works? >> well, it still -- two audiences that i'm the last idealists, so i'm gone, there are no more and it was a hugely disillusioning experience, i'd say particularly not just the surveillance that went on under the previous administration but what came to be or what we discovered were the assassination plots and then even worse, the use of the cia by the mofia or try to carry out those plots against fidel

castro. well, this opened up so many dark currents under our government. i characterized it as a suer under the city on a hill, and the poor 37-year-old first term first year senator, this was great disul lugsillusiondisillusionment, but the work of the committee and willingness on a bipartisan basis to make fundamental changes in the broadly defined intelligence sector was a triumph of democracy, and a tribute to the 11 members of the committee, and probably one of the best congressional staffs that it's ever been put together in the history of the republic. >> and you're the chief counsel of the staff, but you didn't have any intelligence background when asked to do the job. how did you gain the trust of the intelligence agencies?

>> well, how did we and i don't think i'm very important in that, but we got it by first being determined. that was absolutely necessary, and the senator had a great remark in which he said, you know, we'll just get extensions so they can't outlast us, and then showing the bipartisan nature of the committee, john towers said something like hallelujah, god bless you something like that, and then also so in addition to being determined, show that you can reliably handle secrets and because there are legitimate secret, and i think our committee did that extraordinarily well. we had essentially no leaks and we made reasonable agreements with the executive branch about keeping certain things keeping secrets and in contrast, the

house committee founded faltered, and failed because they refused to reach accommodations with the government. >> okay. and vice president, it's always hard to keep politics out of politic, and this was an investigation by politicians, what did you do to relieve any concerns that there was going to be polarization or partisanship in the organization? >> i think there needs to be a separate study on how this committee worked, how it was established, and how it approached its activities because we did achieve i think a general acceptance as committee. it was truly bipartisan, and it was working with everybody to bring these results about. i would start in that study by reading the following names frank church german, john g. tower, vice chairman phillip

hart walter huddleston, bob morgan gary hart, howard baker, barry goldwater, mac mathias, and richard striker, and his staff, bill miller, fred schwartz, kurt smothers who i do not think is here. how did you get a committee like that? my answer is mike mansfield. he wanted this to succeed. he wanted to set up a committee that he thought could go through this huge explosive hearing, this process and do what he knew would have to be done to work together and sustain bipartisanship, and that worked. this committee was working together. there was a single staff. we didn't have a republican staff or democratic staff.

bill miller came off the staff of john sherman cooper, one of the saints of the senate, and also republican and he had enormous prestige in that senate as a gifted staff member and he was able -- he knew exactly what had to be done. he was an old hand and then i think you have to say that the executive branch, maybe with a little time but they ended up in effect supporting what we were all doing. president ford who was not an ideolog, part of the process, but he wanted it to succeed. you had attorney general levi --

levy, from the university of chicago who became a tremendous supporter as the head of the justice department in shaping regulations and rules and became a believer before it was over. so the contrast of this committee that worked together excellent staff that it provided that same background and then the kbektive branch cooperating not perfectly, but when you think of what we ask of them and what they delivered, one of the jobs i had was as chairman of this committee domestic task force, we called it, was to look into the fbi records some of you are with me on that process. well, we were seeing stuff that never had been seen before. we were seeing a pattern of abuse.

we uncovered, for example, the dr the fbi -- well, it was really hoover's antagonism towards martin luther king. he was convinced that the -- that martin luther king headed a black hate group, as they put it, and he had agents all over the place trying to find something on king to knock him off his ped stool as they put it. they tried to break up the marriage when king was picked to get -- go to see the pope to get high international wards. the bureau tried to rock that. in effect corrupt the public process and undermine and destroy one of the great leaders

america's had, and i think when this cam out and we realize this was not a process that worked with the public but it was a process corrupting one of the most essential elements, we knew we had something. that carried the day. >> in the play of not heros, but certainly important figures adding to what was said, director william colby very controversial situation for him. he was under enormous pressure from the cia not to reveal some of the worst excesses or just say excesses but he made it decision to disclose to us in a highly intense long session,

what became known as the family jewels, and it was in the inspector general's report that pretty much covered the water front of things that might be unconstitutional, and he made a decision to reveal those to us, and it was a monumental decision and it made an incredible difference in our ability to address the reforms and propose the reforms that we did, and he left the agents eventually under great criticism from people who thought he should have stone walled and chose not to. i always felt he was a very, very important figure. another factor that's really important was the structure of the committee because as mansfield set it up, it was six democrats to five republicans instead of what would have been normal 7-4 and john tower was a

vice chairman, not a ranking member, and the committee in its reaching bipar san conclusions, in a way are our most important finding that every president from franklin roosevelt but nixon, six presidents four of whom are democrats and two republicans, abused their secret power, and i think it helped us enormously internally and externally to show that we were not being partisan in our major findings. >> and senator hart you worked more on the foreign intelligence matters, and in a recent remembrance, you wrote the church committee experienced -- your church committee experience, it's important to recognize the extraordinary power the united states has in the international respect for our constitutional principles. but it often seems in times of crisis we forget that power.

why is that? >> i think the phrase in times of crisis we see -- we being the other branchs of government, particularly congress to the executive branch, if we are under assault or perceive ourselves to be under assault, the problem is that then encourages administrations to i wouldn't say generate crisis, but to elevate a crisis to acquire power, and this is where congress is most under pressure to do its job, and to ask questions, not to undermine executive authority, but to defend the constitution. as i said there and as i said many times in other places, the -- those of us who had a chance to travel the world know

we are being watched by not only leaders in foreign governments, but people on the street, and they watch us not only for the kind of comical excesses that we exhibit, but the degree to which we live up to who we claim to be. the american people and their presidents and others claim high standards for this country and then when we don't live up to those, this is not missed by people around the world. they see that. and it's not only kind of hypocrisy, but it's used by our opponents to say see, they claim one thing and do another. >> and you have written a book on secrecy. how does this undermine our democratic process? >> to pick up on exactly what gary said.

the heart of american democracy is that the people should be involved. that's what we're about. jameis madison said that in a democracy, public opinion is the true sovereign and the problem is that we have over the last 60-plus years, we've gone into a secrecy society, a secrecy culture where the norm is to keep it away from the people instead of striving to get it to the people and that is totally inconsistent with the values pop which this country was built. >> and another one of the myths that i think has developed is the idea that the church committee investigation or another type of comprehensive investigation is about playing got-ya. it's animal about trying to find the abuses and wag a finger rather than about improving the functions. >> of the greatest

strengths exhibit by the work of the church committee is how that report has endured. no one challenged accuracy of our findings. i have not heard one serious scholar say this is is not right, so we got our facts right, and it was not just a got-ya disclosure, but it was -- it contained a range of remedies that were designed to event recurrence of these abuses the two intelligence committees, which had not been there before, foreign intelligence surveillance act, the court, the new regulations and rules issued out of the white house was this not a passing effort to move on? it was an attempt to bring about a fundamental change in oh we

dealt with intelligence so it was more efficient, more responsive, and also adhere to the laws and constitutions of the united states. >> did the heads of the agencies at the time recognize it as -- its purpose as making the intelligence agencies better at what they did? some of them did. one of the underlying themes that i picked up and i think several others did is when you talk to people like colby those in the burroweau, elsewhere mountain agencies they complained how screwed up their agencies were. we mentioned angleton earlier. and i heard this from colby. angleton was a in a key spot in the cia, and he decided all intelligence dealing with counter espionage was contrived

by the soviet union, so none of it was to be believed, don't worry about it. it should be worried about. what was correct? what was not? how do we deal with it? there were other stories about you know, hoover was gone now, but hoover had you know, witch's brew going on in there, and they knew that. he was full of strange ideas. >> can you tell stories? >> he wanted to make certain any gossip about any high official was immediately delivered to him. he had a file he kept in his own office, several file cabinets, with every salacious rumor that he heard. he would go to the principal involved and say, well, there's a story out, but don't worry about it, we'll keep it under

so there was another kept officer. and this stuff was going on, and it bothered a lot of the sensitive bureau agents, so there was a great desire within the agencies to get reform and i think they wanted us to succeed. >> let me fortify that with a story i told at a dinner last night that recurs in one of our early organizational meetings as to how we should proceed and by the way, since this has never been done before no one knew what step one was. order files and so forth, so it was my turn the most junior member to make a suggestion. i said what if we start out by each of us asking for our own cia and first files, and the room got very very quiet, and silence was broken by barry

goldwater who said, i don't want to know what they got on me. so there you are. you had members, senior members of the senate of the united states intimidated by the very agencies we were setting out to investigate. >> if hoover had not been dead, we'd have had a hard time getting going with the fbi maybe we would have maybe we wouldn't of but it was sure helpful he was dead. [ laughter ] on the first point about got-ya, that was never our point, got-ya, but we did believe that to get reform, it was important not to just heretheorize, but to get hard evidence. we showed dr. king and many, many less well-known people were abused and injured and committed suicide and so forth, so you -- it's not got-ya, but it's to make credible the need for

fundamental reform. >> well, then, you take the perhaps most controversial area we investigated, the assassination attempts to a person person, members and staff, the effort was not to pin blamg, but to find out and systematically how that decision was made and we spent hours asking questions, hearing secret hearings, with people involved in the eisenhower and kennedy administration who made the decision. who decides in our government to kill another foreign leader? it was not pin the tail on the donkey. it was an inquiry that was systemic. how does the government of the united states make a decision to kill a foreign leader? >> with the idea being that by knowing how those decisions are

made, you can put in guidelines and procedures and oversight mechanisms that will then make sure that we have systems that will prevent those activities. >> discovering a system which it was designed to make it extremely difficult to decide who made the decision was itself a terrible mistake by the government and that system needed to be exposed and criticized. >> yes, and that led to one of the reforms presidential findings, that if you conduct a significant covert operation, the president of the united states has to authorize it, so the -- at least -- it's not, again, to pin blame, but it is to identify accountability. that's what we were trying to establish. >> one thing i appreciate about all your service is how you stuck to the issues and worked on them all the decades since

and, senator hart, you cochaired the commission on national security which warned of the threat of international terrorism before the 9/11 attacks. what were you able to see in connecting that investigation that the intelligence agencies were not or that the administration wasn't? >> well part of what we -- and they were starting to see the terrorist threat. they had naval ships bombed or dynamited attacked, our embassies had been attacked. it was not, like, a secret, but what we were led to conclude in that commission, two and a half years of study was that sooner or later that this conflict is

coming to our shores. it's not whether there's going to be more terrorism. our final statement in the report was america will be attacked by terrorists using weapons of mass destruction. we did not say commercial airliners. and that americans will die on american soil possibly in large numberings numbers numbers. that was nine months before 9/11. what failed there was not the intelligence community. it was the failure of authorities, executive authority, to listen and pay attention, and they had the same intelligence we did. they just did not pay attention to it. >> and in your book, you quote former white house chief of staff james baker after 9/11 said the church community, quote, unilaterally disarmed our intelligence committees. >> well, it was -- >> do you agree with that?

[ laughter ] >> well, i forgive him. he was emotional at that moment. it was the afternoon of 9/11, and he said we caused 9/11. he did not pay attention to the record number one, for example the church committee said the fbi should get out of the business of investigating, you know, dissent and concentrate on terrorism. we said the cia should spend more effort with human intelligence and less simply relying on machines, and also howard baker his fellow republican with the same last name who is a great member of the church committee had said being in the long run, this investigation will be very helpful to the intelligence community, and then the idea that for 25 years which it was then, the people in government had been helpless to correct this terrible wrong that we'd done is itself absurd, and then

finally picking up on the warnings that gary talked about that were going on in the summer of 2001 after your report, the white house got many warnings that there was going to be a devastating terrorist attack, and i tried to develop in my book the argument that had they released that information to the public and particularly importantly to all the people in the government who were responsible for logoking at things like strange people getting pilot's licenses it is likely 9/11 would have been prevented. they simply did not do it not out of malice, but because the secrecy culture is one that once something is secret, people sort of stop thinking about it so they never thought about well, wouldn't it be smart to let the public and the people in the

government know that there are real powerful threats. >> well, secrecy culture operated even inside the intelligence community. our commission recommended the creation of the department of homeland security because we found out coast guard customs and border patrol were all operating -- you knew that, under different federal departments. they did not have a common data base. they did not have a common communication system. they had no way of talking to each other, and they all reported to separate cabinet officers, so that's why we recommended the creation of the homeland security. those three agencies and fema not the huge thing we now have -- >> and the church committee's recommendations were an attempt to harness the power of our constitutional checks and balances checking all three branchs, like the reporting

requirements, guidelines for the fbi, and your term for fbi directors, and judicial branch, and the foreign intelligence surveillance court which we'll talk about in a minute, but senator, you were one of the founding members of the senate intelligence committee which was the congressional oversight committee created as a result of the investigation. how would you rate its performance? >> well -- schwartz said earlier the belief the common believe in washington was that members of congress, politicians, couldn't keep secrets, and overwhelming, we heard, and it was in the press this is going to fame because these guys can't keep their mouths shut so, well, that was challenge number one. don't talk. don't leak. now, in a culture in a city of

overwhelming leaks, this was a huge historic achievement, not only the church committee but the follow-on, the perimeter oversight committee. so that was step number one, keep your mouth shut. when you're told secrets, don't divulge secrets to your friends particularly if your friends are journalists. [ laughter ] with all do respect. we had to institutionalize reforms of the church committee, and that was the first task set these recommendations into process, some of which were statutory, some of which were by executive order, and institutionalize briefings. you had to set up a system whereby director of cia or his deg nation, fbi cia, routinely came before us, and particularly on covert operations, this was a

very teninteresting situation. part of the mandate to the community was if you're going to undertake @q a covert operation, tell us about it. and not just an agent on the street talking to possible source, and an operation. and there was also question of could we keep our mouths shut? i was involved in the first two or three notifications. i think our first chairman was danny and he was in hawaii when, i think, one of the first notices came in and it happened to be when congress was not in session. i happened to be here. the agency got a hold of me, okay, we're to do this, here's what we are doing here's the operations. hi to find -- go to a secure a phone, call the chairman of the committee, brief him, and let him decide whether to brief all the rest of the members of the

committee. it was a work in progress, inventing oversight as we went along, and then, finally, a staff member made the first congressional trip, i think just the two of us, to visit cia stations abroad to see how they operated, and we went to the key stations in europe, and the middle east, and as many as ten or 11 77 or 78 still in power, and there's stories to tell about that. [ laughter ] >> and vice president, you were elected and went to the executive branch. how did you look at these reform recommendations once you changed branchs? >> if i had any questions about it, i'd call fred schwartz over to help me understand it.

no. i think that was a fortuitous development thatí helped for a small transition from the recommendations of the church committee to the incorporation of those recommendations in the executive policies. carter agreed to that, and i talked, and spent time talking to the head of the agencies. they agreed to it. and when our executive rules went in place there was unanimity within the executive branch and with the congress about where we wanted to go and that unanimity i think worked for five years and then slowly it went elsewhere. and if i would, i know we're going to talk about this, but i

would say our proposal was based on the idea that there has to be a separation of checks and balances while trying to keep this information secret. it had not really been tried before and we gave it the college try. i would say it's worked fairly well but with some -- with time, some disappointments. i think the congressional work of the congressional committees has been somewhat cooptative by the federal agencies themselves. i think we've seen evidence that they're restraped by maintaining diplomatic relations with each other, and the public pays the price because we don't get full accountability. we've had some recent disputes

and internal disputes that have been, i think, helped demonstrate that. we thought that the courts -- the fisa court was going to be a magistrate functioned for the federal bench. in other words -- that's what it was, that the dwsh its only function was to act on applications of warrants but to act with general jurisdiction as though it were a regular federal court. that slip some. i know this afternoon we'll hear from one of the judges and that bothers me because the court can be a private supreme court for the agencies. everything they do is enin camera

without any other litigants or those interested in the issue at all. it's in secret and it's without other interests involved not just at the trial level, but appellate level. there's no way that a responsible party who objects to what is going on with solid reasons for doing so will be heard. and i think that the idea 2ñ of giving broader jurisdiction to that court is a mistake. and either we have to broaden the rules for who can participate in these hearings, or we have to walk the court back to the rules that we put in place when we made our recommendations, but the idea of having a secret court of general

jurisdiction competing with regular courts and with the information monitor being the secret agency court i think is intolerable, and we should do something about that. >> if i got the floor here -- >> sure. >> another thing that really bothers me is the state secret's defense. almost every court case involves activities of the agencies very quickly a petition comes in from the government saying this is a state secret issue and can want be heard. we cannot participate and the court's not always, but very often will say, we'll dismiss the case. so you can't even get to the merits of the case no matter what the reasons for it. we have to make judgments for what is done, but under the

current process, the state secrets issue that's being used across the board now almost every case is followed by a dismiss sal so we don't -- and also i don't know if the -- if he was here today from -- from local law school here but she said that the -- there's a lot of evidence that private companies will press the government to claim state secrets to help them in a case they have so it's a dangerous tendency. >> you're referring to laura donahue. is she here? >> no. okay. she was on the list, but it is a

huge problem, and i want to see reforms on these issues to make the court more accountable. >> uh-huh. and because there is so much secrecy in the courts and in the intelligence committees, one of the ways that we find out about things going on that are often leaks to the media and a lot of conscientious government employees who see something wrong and try to report it end up suffering greatly losing their jobs even being prosecuted more recently. how important is that channel of information to the public? >> well, it's vital. look, there's one person he today, tom drake whose crime was describing how nsa was being inefficient in trying to deal with the incredible volume of information they take in every second second, and who was charged with the espionage act and 35 years potential sentence. it was a terrible overreaction

to what was essentially a effort to blow the whiszletle and to get the government to do a better job, and being more general, this country depends on newspapers and journalists in general. we were build newspapers. right after madison made that comment on public opinion, the u.s. congress gave subsidies to newspapers so that in a while 90% of the weight of the mails were newspapers and only 10% of the revenue. so journalism is vital, and it is still vital today. whistle blowers are vital. i mean, i'm just going to make an unsolicited comment about edward snowden, what the congress is now doing to amend the patriot act prove that he

acting from patriotic motives actually helped the country. so information coming from the inside and investigative journalists is absolutely vital to american democracy. >> great, thank you. i want to get to questions, but all three of you signed on to strengthening oversight report that the brendan center put out calling for a comprehensive investigation. do you think it's time for that kind of investigation, and what advice can you give to -- >> before we get to that, i want to pick up on that point. i'm a big obama supporter, supported him in every election. i'm proud of him as president, but i don't like what he's doing in the intelligence area, and this administration has been tougher on the press by far than any other administration in

american history. the press has terrorized people who want to talk to the press, scare thed to death, and i hope they think it over and help us find balance between the responsibility of the press and the ability of americans to speak out. 24 is a real tough problem now. >> so i'm going to go ahead and open it up to questions if we have questions. we do have a microphone. if you could raise your hand. >> good morning, incredible program. thank you for being here. 70% of the security budget is paid to private contractors, and abuses occurred by the government are now being handled under the private contractors, thinking for instance, janice

surveilled for eight years by clara george because she wrote something unfavorable about the circus circus, and saw that with the hb gary hack of power point presentations describing how they were going to harass wikileaks contributors and various critics, so i think what you are doing is fantastic. how do you reach out and include the intelligence community in the effort? i think the worst abuses are happening there. >> to repeat the question, asking about the increasing privatization -- excuse me -- of intelligence, and how we get oversight control of private companies that did work that used to be in the purview of -- >> well this is since this is the biggest development, one of the biggest in the last 40

years. the explosive growth of the government side of intelligence, the expansion of the nsa to some degree, the cia, and others, and, of course, the new layer of director of national intelligence with hundreds if not thousands of employees, that's a separate issue. so the government side of it has grown explosive lyly but then you have the contractors. an i don't think in our ancient time there were private contractors in this so-called community. how many there are today god knows. it's estimate edd the number of employees and contractors in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands. many systems is to go off budget so you don't have budgetary

accountability because the director, whatever they are called, can hire these copnsul consultants consultants, mr. snowden, by the way, for better or worse, and they are not in the same level of accountability as public employees, and then, finally, you layer on top of that the explosive expansion of technology so you got a bigger public community. you add to that a private side of the dimensions we do not know, and maybe even the president of the united states does not know, and then the ability to pick stuff out of any individual anywhere in the world, and it's a brave new world.

>> high, i wanted to talk about the intelligence agency charters. now, one of the big projects that came out of the committee, and mr. vice president-elect, there was actual work done on this inside the administration early in the carter years and if you look at the paperwork on that, you see suddenly the administration s.t.a.r.t.ed out sportive of charters just stops doing anything on this, and senator hart, the intelligence committee that pushes on charters stops after 1980, and i'd like to get your reading on did we lose an opportunity there? should we have charters for our intelligence agencies? how do we go about doing that if we wanted to get there? >> my recollection is vague on that but i think we found it impossible to write. we were forit.

we tried to write it. it's so difficult. >> yeah. >> on the committee. >> right. >> and, of course, the -- >> oh, yeah. we -- i think we gave up because we -- and i was for it but we could not get it done because we didn't know how to do it. >> they wrote internal attorney general guidelines for the fbi that took that pressure off unfortunately, those have been amended many times since including in 2008 where they were basically e vice rated but that was a great question, thank you very much. >> something was directed to me but i didn't hear it. >> he -- that the committee stop pressing for it eventually, that intelligence committees that were pressing for charters for the agencies eventually grew weary and stopped pressing the chapterers. >> intelligence communities today? >> no, no, up until 1980. >> i don't know.

>> no. >> hi, thank you very much to the center and to the panelists for the program. i'm adam with the american library association. libraries, of course, for decades are on the front lines to restore civil liberties lost to the patriot act and before. in 78 hours, the senate is going to reconvene to do something or nothing with respect to the usa freedom act with respect to extending expiring provisions to the usa patriot act. i would be a bad lobbyist if i did not take advantage of the panel to ask you gentlemen, to say whatever you wish to former colleagues in the senate. [ laughter ] >> yes so the question is, three provisions to the patriot act set to expire and congress is now coming to a decision point and what would you advice

be to them? >> well, you know, it's fashionable to say we've got -- we've got to find a balance security and liberty privacy and yet no one figure out what that balance is, and it's -- it's one that i think perplexes all of us, does me, anyway, even to this day. there are bad people in the world, and some are in our country, and so a public, which by and large if surveyed would overwhelmingly say, protect my privacy, 99 % of whom when the bomb goes off say, why weren't you doing your job? again we're in the 21st century

world of technology where the ability to survey someone, listen to phone calls, track messages and so forth is greater than its ever been. the old days you sent 40 fbi agents out on the street to follow somebody. today, you can sit in a control room somewhere and listen to virtually anything if you can. i'm told we're now entering an age of encryption in which your cell phone vendors say, oh, no we're going to protect you from the government. well, it -- well, if your concern is the bomb going off, then you are not sure you want citizens protected from the government if the government is doing its job in the appropriate way. so i keep coming back to best protection of people's liberty is the fourth amendment to t if the system

is not working, then let's find one that does in which in secret or not, probably in secret but with a public advocate on the other side of the case to say, your honor, you hear the government's case, now let me tell you hypothetically or otherwise what the case for rejecting this warrant is so at least you have an advocacy proceeding with what the vice president is promoting here. that's one solution. but -- all i can say is there's going to be another major terrorist attack on this country. i happen to think it's going to be biological, but it may not be, and it concerns me. people in new york are deeply concerned. as they should be. people in denver should be concerned as well. >> one of the controversy,

picking up on the question, with one of the expiring provisions in section 215 is when the government did an animal cyst and independent groups, they found it was never useful to prevent a terrorist attack. >> i'd like to answer that question. >> yep. >> and now that i listened to gary, i agree with what he said but i think that the issue before the congress the next few days is whether we eliminate this so-called meta data strategy strategy. there's been two insider commissions with key officials, experts, both of which said this is not effective. it is an enormous undertaking. it's a big unlimited strategy to interfere with the privacy of americans and the fourth amendment. it was sort of -- it was adopted in secret.

it was -- the congress acted later without being told what they were voting on, and 24 is the first time we've really known what's going on and i hope when this is over that -- and i think the president has said he wants to get rid of meta data, this is a good time to try to -- and many of the leaders in the congress are saying that on both sides, this is the most optimistic opportunity i've seen in a long time to step back from some of this excess that we've been dealing with. >> picking up on the word that you said. wow, since 9/11. look at what happened. a lot of multiple things have happened. excesses happened but what's going on now is not partisan. you have that vote today, overwhelmingly both republicans

and democrats, talk about excess with creative ways to still protect the countries that don't just say you can do anything you want to. >> adding to that comment with mondale's. it's not new, not edgar, but -- that vacuum, but what i was talking about was targeted with probable cause that a crime has been committed or is about to be. >> right. >> let me go to you. >> hi there, good morning. thank you so much for coming in and speaking. it's an honor and a pleasure, so my question is about, and we touched on this earlier what should the guideline be? as you said before -- or

actually, i was wondering was there ever a point in time when you guys were working in the church committee where you found that something you can seen in the public, you found it was actually better to keep it secret? how do you find or how do you feel -- sorry -- how do you feel about keeping certain things secret? how do you feel about walking that fine line between liberty and secrecy? where does it end with the public? where do they not need to know? >> so the question, yeah. so during your investigation

did you come across things that needed to be kept secret? >> there was an extraordinary event, almost a daily event. we had -- we fried to put in place things that helped us like we would not accept the name of any agent any american agent. we did not want it in the files. we did not want to hear the person's name. we wanted to stay out of that business because it was not essential to what we were doing so all the way through we were sorting out ways of dealing with your question, yet move ahead with our strategy. >> well one interesting issue we faced is whether hearings on the assassination plots to kill castro and to kill other people

would be held in public, and senator howard baker pushed hard that they should be held in brick giving good arguments, and senator frank church, the chair, said, no i don't think we should hold them in public because, a, these are going to be our first hearings, and b, it's inevitable if you hold those hearings in public, things will come out which would not be good to come out. one thing, particularly names and whereas if you hold the hearing in executive session and write an extremely detailed report, you avoid those risks. of course, it would have been politically great for senator church to hold those incredibly dramatic hearings would have been kind of fun for me because i usually did the first examination of the witnesses. [ laughter ] but i think he was right that it was better to be cautious and

hold those hearings in private and have an extremely detailed final report which gary was one of the people who was the drafting committee church and tower and gary. it was a good fun -- >> could i use this occasion as i could in the past just to identify a hangnail, but plagues me 40 years later naming names. the three figures involved in the castro plots with the cia we heard from one of -- we heard from one of them, john, and from him twice, and the second time -- first time he came and went, no public notice at all, and highly secretive, and questions, obviously, were who on the other handed castro killed? what role did you play and so forth? and i felt at the time, i don't

know about the vice president, but he was generally forthcoming, but still knew a lot of stuff he was not telling us, and it -- he -- he went home to miami and disappeared, and ended up dead. he was in his 70s. in those terms in those days, that was retirement. for the rest of us now, that's middle-aged. [ laughter ] the second figure was sam, the top mafia figure in america. either we were prepared to subpoena him or the house committee was. he was killed in his basement with six bullet holes to the throat. neither of these crimes have been solved. now, by and large, the media include

included, these were dismissed as mafia stuff. there is no doubt in my mind they were killed in connection with our committee. now, the question is why? who did it? why? captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2008 captioning performed by vitac clvp